Sig Mejdal was at NASA solving the mysteries of the human body in conjunction with those solving the mysteries of the universe. As the Astros' new director of decision sciences, Mejdal will be tasked with figuring out the mysteries of baseball's last-place team using every piece of data within his virtual reach. less

Sig Mejdal was at NASA solving the mysteries of the human body in conjunction with those solving the mysteries of the universe. As the Astros' new director of decision sciences, Mejdal will be tasked with ... more

Photo: Handout

Astros' formula for success builds on its own data bank

1 / 3

Back to Gallery

Sig Mejdal, the Astros' executive with the most obscure job title in baseball - director of decision sciences - brought his iPad on his honeymoon two years ago.

While visiting Sweden and Norway, Mejdal found himself checking a private website the Astros' front office uses, without hyperbole, for every baseball decision.

Contract information, scouting reports, statistics common and proprietary - the Astros have centralized most every piece of useful baseball information at one password-protected web address.

Mike Elias, the Astros' amateur scouting director and a huge part of the team's rebuilding effort, thinks nothing of pulling out his iPhone to see what reports the team has on the player he just saw in rural Georgia.

Baseball, like so much of the business world, is in the midst of the age of proprietary data. That encompasses much more than just the advanced statistics the book "Moneyball" popularized with its release a decade ago.

When the Astros hired general manager Jeff Luhnow in December 2011, he had a 25-page plan he presented to owner Jim Crane. In it were details for this website - a complex, built-from-scratch database - that would be fully tailored to every one of the club's needs.

Related

Since senior technical architect Ryan Hallahan was hired in February 2012, the database has become just about the most useful baseball tool available. Some features, like a trade analyzer, seem ripped straight from a video game.

It's one of the coolest toys the public will never play with.

The Astros are not the first team to build their own database, although they believe theirs rivals anyone's. The Cleveland Indians gained notoriety as the first to build a confidential system, called "DiamondView." The Boston Red Sox further popularized the trend with theirs, nicknamed "Carmine."

The Astros, of course, needed a name for theirs. When an email went out for suggestions, Elias happened to be sitting next to his wife, Alexandra, a marketing specialist.

She tied the themes together immediately: the Astros, the space program, a mainframe for employees working all throughout the country and even the world.

One of Luhnow's favorite songs is David Bowie's "Space Oddity," with the lyrics, "This is ground control to Major Tom." He happens to be a big Bowie fan and joked that the tune should play every time the site is accessed.

"That was during my formative years," Luhnow said of his affinity for Bowie.

The project itself is permanently in a formative state. There are constantly new features and abilities to add, and what makes Ground Control so powerful is its customizability.

Teams don't have to build their own databases. When Luhnow arrived, the club used a popular system sold by Bloomberg Sports, and it kept using Bloomberg while Ground Control was built.

Priority No. 1 for the club was getting Ground Control up in time for that year's amateur draft. Just like this year and 2013, the Astros had the first overall pick in 2012.

By the end of 2012, or maybe early 2013, Ground Control had reached a fully functional state, although that's a disingenuous characterization considering it's perpetually in flux.

"The analytical engine is separate from the interface, so there was a lot of work going on developing the database and developing the interface," Luhnow said. "The database you have to build right away, because you can't analyze without having the data in the right format. The priorities were the database first, then the analytical engine, and the interface was a third priority.

"We had a very bare-bones interface for a while. After the draft, the next critical milestone was the trade deadline, because we knew we were going to be trading players and we knew we wanted to have all our information organized in a way that would help."

Luhnow and Mejdal both had clear ideas of what they wanted after using the system the St. Louis Cardinals used, named "Red Bird Dog."

"Even if you leave analytics out of it, there is a tremendous amount of information the decision-makers want to see when they make their decision," Mejdal said, "What's happening in the baseball industry is not too different than what's happening in other industries.

"The amount of data available to make your decision is growing, if you want to use the term, exponentially. It's just growing significantly, and human capabilities are not growing significantly. The importance of assisting the human decision-maker with decision aid is important in any field, and especially in a field that you can argue is a big data field."

Behind the curtain

Ground Control has an extraordinarily clean interface. There's nothing intimidating about it for any experienced computer user.

Video of players can be downloaded on the spot, and most anything the baseball operations folks do goes through it - from looking up the history of a player in a foreign country to preparing scouting reports of the Yankees for this season's opening day.

Projections and the like are updated after every game for which reliable statistics are available, including winter league games in other countries.

Hallahan, a 30-year-old programmer, had never worked in pro baseball before Mejdal called him "out of the blue," as Hallahan put it.

A Chicago native who grew up a Cubs fan with the requisite Midwest accent, Hallahan worked for STATS Inc. for about five years. He studied computer science at Augustana College in Illinois.

Astros front office members look at Hallahan as a wizard. Kevin Goldstein, the team's director of pro scouting, recently asked Hallahan for a new feature that Goldstein hoped would be done by opening day.

Hallahan finished it in about five days.

"We had literally nothing and created this database from scratch, and we created our interface from scratch," Hallahan said. "Originally, I thought, 'Oh yeah, well, we'll spend a year building off the main thing, and I'm not sure what the plan will be after that.' It's amazing how it spread. Originally, it was just us in decision sciences building this out and giving information to Jeff, or our scouting people, or anyone who needed it. But from there, it's really grown to the entire baseball operations department.

"Player development people are asking for information. They have ideas of stats they want to see. … It's really spread to cover everything. There's been no shortage of things to work on."

Mike Fast, an analyst, and Darren DeFreeuw, an analytics developer, are also key players in Ground Control's design. Hallahan said the project, which relies on a programming language called SQL, among others, has come together faster than he expected.

Putting data to use

"During the spring, any time I'm not on a game, I'm probably on Ground Control or asleep," Elias said. "The best thing for me is we have a scheduling interface. I can see all the cross-checkers and scouts, and we can see where everyone's going to be. We've got every college and high school game in the country loaded in there, and we can mix and match."

If Elias is watching a prospect in person, he can find everything he needs.

"Who is this guy? Are we 'on' him?" Elias said. "Pulling out my iPhone, I can look up whether we have any scouting reports on this player, what his age or class in school is, and what his college statistics have been over his career - including anything he's done in a summer league."

It's the same for Luhnow when monitoring player transactions around the league.

A player was designated for assignment early last week. Luhnow could have waited for the automatically generated email Ground Control sends out, but instead he just jumped on and checked out the player.

"I looked at his reports and I looked at his projection and injury history and kind of came up with my own point of view," Luhnow said. "The minute you hear any player is potentially available, you do those sort of things. I could wait, and I do get an email a couple hours later, but I'm not that patient sometimes."

Playing it close to vest

In the background is a low-level but omnipresent worry. Doing everything in-house requires keeping everything in-house.

Luhnow ran tech companies before entering baseball. Crane, the owner, has dealt with plenty of sensitive information as a businessman. Were a member of the Astros front office to leave, some of the team's operating secrets would leave with them.

"We have done what we need to do to minimize information leaking," Luhnow said. "If someone leaves, they're allowed to take what's called the residual intellectual property with them, which is anything they remember in their head. They're not allowed to take anything beyond that. There are ways to protect yourself by making sure that people have access to the data that they only need to make the decisions in the area."

Not everyone can see everything in Ground Control. Scouts see only what they need, and so on and so forth.

But risk never disappears entirely, and Luhnow said his openness even for this story was a risk.

"Information goes from club to club," Luhnow said. "We need to be aware of that. But, also, information gets dated pretty quickly. … Our strategy, starting from Jim (Crane) down, is we want to be transparent enough to our fans to where they feel like they're involved but at the same time not give away any proprietary information."

It's better to be at risk than be in the dark. Ground Control is so versatile, so handy, and every team that has a similar system would say the same thing. The reward has been extremely high.

"I had to make decisions when I first got to Houston, the Jed Lowrie trade (acquiring him in 2011 from Boston) - I was flying blind," Luhnow said. "I had to leave everything behind with the Cardinals, and I'm in a new environment where the tools are not what I'm used to, or what I ultimately wanted. So it was, 'Let's talk to the scouts, let's do whatever analysis we can,' which was pretty good. But it was different. I don't want to go back to a world where I'm making decisions without the information. That's a scary world."